It's Magic, After All

winter always brings a little something extra to the landscape

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I get the mechanics of it, the whole seasonal cycle. I get that the Earth is tilted, and in orbit, continuously cycling us through longer and shorter, nearer and farther, hotter and colder. High noon overhead, low angle on the horizon. Tilted towards. Tilted away.

But, really, seasons are just magic. Just a way to take a familiar landscape and renew it again and again. Just a way to make sure that as soon as you get used to something, it will change. With the added comfort of knowing that it will start coming back around just as soon as you’ve begun to get used to something new. Pure magic in the every single day.

And do you know, somehow after all these years, every single winter, I still see one more thing I’ve never seen before?

Frozen bubbles…

Crystal forests…

And this year - it was a glitter sky.

In photography, sometimes when your light is too low, the camera sensor can’t gather enough information to render a smooth image. Instead, you get this grainy, speckled effect that we call noise. It’s considered a defect, although it can be fun to play with artistically.

But somehow, in this one fleeting winter moment, nature showed me what noise looks like in real time and perfect form.

A delicious flurry had been silently sifting piles of thick flakes from pillow clouds. It was picturesque, quintessentially wintery. But the flurry was on the move…

It just so happened that a golden winter sun was sinking into the horizon just as the trailing edge of the flurry drifted past. For the briefest of moments, low angle rays of gold raked across millions of suspended crystals and turned the sky to diamond dust.

I know it’s not the first time this has ever happened, this perfectly aligned timing of moving snowstorm with setting sun. But it’s the first time I've seen it. I’ve never even thought about what it might be like.

But now, I’ll always remember.

That’s the thing about nature, really. An ever-shifting combination of infinite variables, many of them familiar and on repeat - but always some combination you’ve never thought to imagine out there on some horizon, just waiting to be discovered.